Letter from the Managing Faculty Director

Welcome, and thank you for your interest in The Field Center for Children’s Policy, Practice and Research.

The Field Center is an interdisciplinary child welfare center at the University of Pennsylvania devoted to improving the systems, policies, and practices that shape the lives of children, youth, and families. Our work begins from a simple but urgent belief: children deserve safety, stability, belonging, and the chance to grow up within relationships and communities that help them thrive. Families deserve support before crisis, respect when they encounter public systems, and policies that recognize their strengths as well as their needs.

Based at Penn’s School of Social Policy & Practice, The Field Center brings together research, policy analysis, education, advocacy, and public engagement to address some of the most pressing challenges in child welfare. We draw on the expertise of affiliated faculty, researchers, students, practitioners, policymakers, community partners, and people with lived experience across Penn, Philadelphia, and beyond. That interdisciplinary perspective is essential. Child welfare questions are never only legal questions, clinical questions, educational questions, medical questions, or social work questions. They are human questions, and they require many forms of knowledge held in conversation with one another.

What makes The Field Center distinctive is our commitment to connecting rigorous scholarship with real-world consequence. We study child welfare systems not from a distance, but with attention to the children, youth, families, caregivers, professionals, and communities whose lives are shaped by policy and practice decisions. Our research, convenings, public education, and policy work are designed to inform more humane, more effective, and more accountable responses to children and families. We seek to generate knowledge that can move: into classrooms, agencies, courtrooms, legislative conversations, community settings, and the everyday decisions that affect whether young people experience safety, dignity, connection, and care.

The current moment in child welfare demands both moral clarity and practical imagination. Across the country, policymakers, advocates, practitioners, and communities are asking hard questions about how to prevent unnecessary family separation, distinguish poverty from neglect, support kinship caregivers, reduce reliance on foster care and congregate care, improve legal representation, address workforce instability, and confront the racial and economic inequities that continue to shape child welfare involvement. Young people in foster care and those leaving care continue to face profound challenges related to housing, education, employment, health, family connection, and enduring relational support.

These are not abstract policy concerns. They are questions about what children and families are owed, and what kind of systems we are willing to build.

Our current priorities include advancing research that informs policy and practice, elevating the voices and experiences of young people and families, supporting evidence-informed and equity-focused reforms, and preparing students and professionals to think critically and courageously about child welfare systems. We are especially committed to work that strengthens prevention, relational permanence, youth voice, legal and policy accountability, and cross-system collaboration on behalf of children and families.

The Field Center’s work is possible because of the many people who share a commitment to children, youth, and families: scholars, students, advocates, practitioners, policymakers, funders, community members, and people with lived experience in child welfare systems. I am grateful for that community, and I believe deeply in what becomes possible when we bring evidence, empathy, imagination, and commitment to this work.

Please reach out if you would like to connect, learn more, or imagine new possibilities with us.

Warmly,

Johanna K. P. Greeson, PhD, MSS, MLSP
Managing Faculty Director
The Field Center for Children’s Policy, Practice & Research
University of Pennsylvania